The Best Food Books of the Year 2012

An inspirational volume on preserving food, a gorgeous guide to pasta and some serious baking manuals complemented the familiar TV-promoted fare this year.

Jamie Oliver has done it again. For the second year running, his latest book, 15-Minute Meals, is occupying the No 1 slot on Amazon's best-selling list. He and the other big names in food (Nigel Slater is a few spots down) are helping cookery books outsell every other genre. Of course, all the best-selling food books are backed up by TV, but this doesn't stop them being good - I still rate just about everything brought out by the River Cottage empire (this year, Three Good Things) and I'm delighted that the gloriously stylish, eclectic Jerusalem also makes Amazon's top 15.

The art of preserving food is really capturing everyone's imagination - to the extent that it could become the new baking. Easily my favourite book of the year is Diana Henry's Salt, Sugar, Smoke. It is not definitive or the most knowledgeable on preserving basics, but it is absolutely the most inspiring. I love the personal way in which it is written and the broad sweep of recipes, which show how each food culture puts a unique stamp on some fairly universal types of preserving. This book was years in the writing, and it shows.

Tinned spaghetti was a childhood treat in our household, but mince was a staple. Josceline Dimbleby's Marvellous Meals with Mince is updated and extended from her original 1980s book for Sainsbury's but is still filled with dishes you will remember with nostalgia. We all (kids included) loved the blue cheese meatloaf, the piglet pie and the Atlas Mountain Soup.

Of the non-recipe food books, two stand out. Dorothy Hartley's Lost World is a chatty, pre-war Rural Rides full of minutiae. Bee Wilson's Consider the Fork traces a history of how we eat food via the implements we use to cook it. It's beautifully written and researched with interesting analysis - I love the section on measurements and a particular paragraph on the ways in which we make our morning coffee. Both of these books made me commit that cardinal sin of reading out passages to my ever-patient partner, just because I had to share.

Have I missed any gems?

A book about pasta was Catherine's choice for the most beautiful food book of the year. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian